The Bataclan Massacre: Unsatisfying Recovery

The Parisian concert hall Le Bataclan is officially reopening on November 12th 2016, one year after the massacre coordinated along the attacks at the Stade de France and in several streets of the Xth and XIth arrondissements. 130 people were killed in these attacks, in addition to 350 injuries of various degrees of severity.

The owner of Le Bataclan, Jérôme Langlet, summed up what underlies the new layout of the concert hall: “we had to change everything in order to erase everything from that night.” France also looks to this reopening as a way to negotiate the grief caused by other terrorist attackes in Nice and at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray since then.

Despite the lengthy research which has been conducted over the past year, the events of that night remains irritatingly opaque. Who designed the strategy, for instance? What about the baffling ease with which the terrorists escaped to Belgium despite the increased network of european security? Was torture involved? On this particular point, the two official [1] [2] reports on that night include a couple of detailed eyewitness accounts, later refuted by a policeman, government officials and medical authorities. Le Parisien and Le Monde thus insist that there is no tangible evidence to conclude that acts of mutilation were inflicted on the hostages, while Le Figaro simply ignores the question. I personally remain skeptical.

The three attackers were French and belonged to the same generation as their victims, yet they perpetrated their crime in the name of ISIS. How should we react to this? The French Left argues that religious terrorism stems from unchecked capitalism leading underprivileged young men to fall into the traps of an empowering and dangerous dogma. The Right, on the other hand, maintains that multiculturalism is a flawed utopia that ignores how the Judeo-Christian and Muslim civilizations are incompatible. In other words, the recurring dispute of our post-modern Western society: diverging over “don’t amalgamate” versus “don’t be naive.”

Unlike this man who lost his wife during the attack, the terrorists definitely have my hate. I do not live in France anymore, but the attacks hit home like never before in my life: these attacks were the bloodiest to take place on French soil since World War II.